The Document Foundation has published statistics that illustrate the growth …

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The Document Foundation (TDF), which launched in 2010 to develop LibreOffice, has published statistics that illustrate the project's rapid growth. Approximately 400 total developers have contributed code to the project. The number of contributors who are active each month generally ranges from 50 to over 100.

LibreOffice is a community-driven fork of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The project started after Oracle's acquisition of Sun with the aim of offering a better governance model and a more inclusive environment than OOo. LibreOffice quickly attracted the support of the major Linux distributors and a large number of independent developers.

The statistics released today show that the LibreOffice community is healthy and diverse. Red Hat and SUSE each account for a large chunk of development, but the volunteers collectively have a higher volume of commits than any of the corporate contributors. The total number of monthly commits tends to range from 1500-3000.

The statistics also show the extent of the LibreOffice project's bugfixing and code cleanup efforts, which have been extensive.

LibreOffice is gaining lots of momentum among users, too. Last year, TDF estimated that the number of users who have tried the open source office suite is approximately 10 million. LibreOffice 3.5, a major update with lots of improvements, is expected to arrive next week.